Mills worked out of an office complex in London near Southwark Cathedral. One day, as he was arriving, he noticed “there was this skinny guy with long hair and aviator shades sitting on the stairs outside my office. I just assumed he was a typical Furs fanboy. Periodically, we’d get people showing up and just sitting there, waiting around hoping to get something signed or meet a member of the band. So I didn't think any more about it.”
“A few hours later my assistant came back from lunch and told me: ‘That weird little guy is still sitting there. Why don't you go and see what he wants?’ I went out and spoke to him. That was my first meeting with Andrew.” [i]
“This was one of his trips into London to go around and make connections. I must have been on his list at that point. It's only when he came in and introduced himself, that the penny dropped: Oh, he’s from that band that Howard was talking about.”
“I can remember as clear as a bell going into Howard Thomspon’s office in CBS on Soho Square one day, as I regularly used to do,” Mills explains. Howard would often play me a bunch of tapes. Howard was an enthusiast, very esoteric, lots of off-the-wall stuff. I’d make polite noises but it was often: ‘No! No! No! Thank God, I don’t have to listen to that again.’ I didn’t feel that way about The Sisters.”
Mills’ first meeting with Eldritch in Southwark led him to conclude straight away that he “definitely marches to a different drummer. He could have got my number off Howard and phoned and set up a formal meeting, but that set the tone. This made sense the more I got to know him. He was a very peculiar character.
“Initially, he seemed almost introverted. He wasn't difficult because he wanted something and he felt I could help him. As long as it was to his advantage, I felt he was willing to play along.” [ii]
When Mills met Eldritch for the first time, The Psychedelic Furs were recording their third album “Forever Now”with Todd Rundgren at his studio in Bearsville in upstate New York. They were on the ascendant and were preparing for another assault on the USA. In contrast, ‘Body Electric / Adrenochrome’, which became The Sisters’ second single in February 1982, had been recorded at Kenny Giles Music, an 8-track studio in Bridlington, a resort town on the North Yorkshire coast.
The Furs were the only band Mills managed and at that point and he intended to keep it that way, so he “didn't make any commitment. I said to Andrew that I could offer them help and advice where I could, but not on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis.”
Mills saw The Sisters live for the first timeon 29 March 1982 at The Funhouse, a first floor club in the centre of Keighley in Yorkshire. This was the debut of the first classic line-up of The Sisters of Mercy: Eldritch, Marx, Adams and Ben Gunn. It was also the first gig for the support band, The March Violets. [iii]
That The Sisters had greatness within them would not have been overly apparent. Gary Marx recalls that Mills “had a digital tuner sent by express courier the next day. By his reckoning we spent almost as long tuning up between songs as playing. That involved me wandering over to Craig and him turning my machine heads for me - we still did that at full volume.”
Mills only occasionally ventured up to Yorkshire and The Sisters rarely ventured to London. Another of the few times Mills met the whole band was at the ZigZag Club in West London on 10 July when The Sisters were supporting The Birthday Party. [iv]Mills felt “there had been no decent pictures of the band.” So “after soundcheck, we climbed through a fence onto waste ground. I also did a series of individual portraits … because we didn't live in close proximity, every time I met with the band I felt there was a barrier needed breaking down.” Mills took a second set of photographs of the band in a Leeds church later in the year. [v]
Mills recognised that Eldritch was interested in the visual presentation of the band, whereas the other Sisters were not. “Andy had interesting ideas about the band’s image. The Merciful Release artwork was great. He obviously took a keen interest in that. Same as Richard and The Furs.”
But Mills had reservations about The Sisters as a group. “The Sisters didn’t really present themselves as a band.Mark looked most of the time like a builder in a string vest and a leather jacket. Craig looked like Craig and Ben looked like a schoolboy. Andy made a bit of an effort but it was still a bit gauche.”
Mills’ sartorial doubts about Marx went both ways. Marx has noted with mild distain that Mills “did have a habit of turning up wearing Mickey Mouse sweat-shirts and pastel slacks.”
“Image and appearance were of minimal interest to me,” Marx continues. “It mattered a lot to Les and in fairness, it did to Andrew. It hardly needs stating that without some attention to how things appeared, no-one would give a damn about the music.”
If anything convinced Mills to become more involved with The Sisters, it was Eldritch’s self-belief and focus. “It was his bloody-mindedness. He was very single-minded and was very much a detail-oriented person. When I first stayed round 7 Village Place (the house in the Burley area of Leeds that Eldritch and Shearsby moved to after St John’s Terrace), I remember looking at his cassette collection. He’d taken cigarette boxes and glued them together and made little shelves. Who else would do that? Every cassette tape was hand-written in this meticulous writing. People who have that kind of attention to detail … can really go somewhere.” [vi]
Mills also hosted Eldritch at his basement flat on Basire Street in Islington. “He was a night person like me, so we’d have conversations quite late into the night … I’d go to bed and he'd crash on the sofa and then he’d be up and out in the morning and out all day. It wasn't until some time later that I’d run into different people and find out that he had been having meetings - with journalists or whatever - but he’d never tell me where he went or what he was doing. He was very secretive and everything he let out would be on his own terms.”
Marx can also remember visiting Mills in London. On one trip “we stayed with some old friends of Andrew’s and went round to Les’ home. I asked if I could look through his albums and put something on. I picked out Ian Hunter’s first solo album and played the long track ‘Boy’.”
Both Mills and The Sisters realised the band needed to make a another record, one better than their first two singles. ‘Body Electric / Adrenochrome’ had been a leap forward, but Eldritch was still handing out the demo tape to promoters in 1982. He had even given Mills a box of the ghastly ‘Damage Done’ singles over a year and a half since they had first come out. “They didn’t exactly fly off the shelves,” remarks Mills. “One of the worst recordings I’ve ever heard.”
However, The Sisters were about to make something very special indeed. At the ZigZag Club, they had played ‘Alice’ live for the first time. All of John Ashton’s dreams of making pumping Suicide-meets-Iggy-meets-Motörhead music were about to come true. [vii]
By late spring of 1982, Ashton was in the living room of his top floor flat on Kingwood Road in Fulham with Eldritch. Mills had connected Ashton with The Sisters because “John had served his apprenticeship with his home recordings. He was a bit of a whizz with a Portastudio. Some of his demos were excellent.”
Eldritch showed no sign of being nervous despite having to play in front of the guitarist of one of his favourite bands. Ashton thinks “he might have been a little bit reserved, maybe he was a little bit shy. He said, ‘I've got this riff.’ I had a little amp and we miced it up.”
After hearing ‘Alice’, Ashton wondered whether in fact Eldritch “was a little bit cocky, an ‘I've-got-this-riff-and-it’s-great’ attitude. Actually, I think he was testing me out to see if I'd be the right person to work with.”
Co-incidentally, before they had gone to Bearsville with Rundgren, Ashton had demoed a new Psychedelic Furs’ song called ‘Alice’s House’ in his flat, using the same Portastudio and drum machine used to make the first ever recording of ‘Alice’. Ashton played ‘Alice’s House’ to Eldritch. In a 2015 Sex, WAX, N Rock N Roll interview, he remembered, “I couldn't tell whether he was impressed or not. He’s very …. ” At this point in the filmed interview, Ashton held one his hands up, palm in front of his face. [viii]
“Andrew took away the version of ‘Alice’ we had recorded,” continues Ashton. “He played it for Les and Les arranged for me to go up to Leeds.”
Ashton arrived at 7 Village Place well prepared. “I rented a car because I had a mixing desk to facilitate getting to the Portastudio. It was 4-track cassette-based recorder, very fancy for its time, but it could only record two tracks. The Sisters had a Carlsbro amp that they plugged the bass and the guitar through. I had the 606 drum machine in one channel of the Portastudio and then everyone else mixed together.” In another coincidence of nomenclature, the model of the mixing desk was also an Alice. [ix]
Ashton set his gear up in the kitchen while The Sisters played as a band in the sitting room at close to full volume. The next morning Claire Shearsby remembers “the neighbours going: ‘What was all that carry on round yours last night?’” [x]
Ashton was impressed by Eldritch’s obvious aptitude for programming drum machines. “He had a book in which he had written out all his drum patterns. Obsessive, written out like the old football pools, with Xs,” remembers Ashton. “It was on graph paper. He would fill in the square where the bass drum hit or where the snare drum hit, any tom-toms where they hit. He had a full-on written-out program of how the beats went.
“Andrew had everything planned out, everyone had their parts, everybody knew what they were doing; in a lot of ways they already had everything together.” Ashton therefore provided a vital missing element: the ability to properly capture The Sisters’ sound onto tape.
Ashton stayed in an upstairs bedroom at 7 Village Place. The time he spent making the demos allowed him to get to know The Sisters better, especially Eldritch. “He had very specific views. He ran the show. He was definitely picking my brains but I didn't feel he was being manipulative, trying to get something for nothing. He seemed interested in us as people and stories about The Furs. Andrew made no bones about being very smart but he didn't boast about it. I'd say he was a bit of a nerd.” [xi]
Ashton was also impressed by Eldritch’s focus on work, not recreation. “He would use speed like a technician would: just the right amount. He wasn’t a big drinker. I never saw him drunk. One time I asked him, if he was going to have a drink. ‘No, I'm pure of heart,’ he replied.” However, they did go to what Ashton remembers as “a huge Victorian-style pub” where “Andrew had a Gin and Tonic. [xii]
“Normally he was dressed in tight blue jeans and a pair of trainers. This time he got a bit dressed up: black shirt, black pants and super long pointy boots. I think Andy Taylor (Eldritch’s real name) was the guy in the blue jeans, in the sneakers, who was the Metalhead.” The other person(a) was shortly to be named “Andrew Eldritch”.
Ashton was also impressed by Gary Marx. “I remember the first time I heard ‘Floorshow’ I was blown away by the riff Mark (Marx’s real name is Mark Pearman) played. He was definitely a good foil for Andrew, the right guy for Andrew at the time.” [xiii]
The approbation went both ways: The Sisters all loved Ashton’s demos, so it was natural that Eldritch asked him back for the studio sessions that followed.
Kenny Giles Music was chosen for the recording of 4 songs: ‘Alice’, ‘Floorshow’, ‘Good Things’ and ‘1969’. KG was well known to The Sisters: not only had ‘Body Electric / Adrenochrome’ been recorded there, but so had the first two March Violets singles, which Eldritch would shortly put out on Merciful Release.
The ‘Alice’ sessions took place over two consecutive weekends.“I remember riding to Bridlington with The Sisters singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ word-for-word in the back of the car,” recalls Ashton. For those seeking added incongruity, the car was a Renault estate. Ashton crashed it on his way back to London.
The Renault also contained a temporary, new member of The Sisters: a freshly purchased 808 drum machine. For these recordings, The Sisters benched their 606. The 808, like all its predecessors and successors, was called Doktor Avalanche.
The sessions were hard work, but straightforward. “There wasn’t a heck of a lot of effects,” says Ashton. “I had an RE 301 Roland tape delay and mixed that in. The only creative addition Andrew brought to the session was that we ran my drum machine through a PA and then miced the PA up,which immediately gave everything a fattened sound. We then blended those tracks in with the dry signal from the 808. This was Kenny’s suggestion. Because it was 8-track, we did some bounces here and there. We recorded the rest of Sunday and came home that night.” [xiv]
The next weekend The Sisters, Ashton and now Mills, who had been impressed by rough mixes, were back in Bridlington for final mixing and overdubs.
“John and I went down the pub with Craig,” Mills recalls. “In fact, he was the only one who was really interested in going down the pub. You could talk to him about football: he was a real Leeds fan. Rather than being the typical quiet bass player in the background, if you got him one-to-one, he really opened up. I said, ‘Look, what do you really want to get out of this?’ He said, ‘I had a chance once before. I was in The Expelaires and I really thought we'd make it. There was major record company interest, A&R sniffing around but we blew it. If I get into that position again, I won't blow it.’”
On one occasion at KG, Mills “was sitting in the control room and Andrew handed me a piece of paper and written on it were various permutations of ‘Andrew’ and ‘Taylor’ and ‘Christian’ and ‘Eldritch’, so it was like, ‘Christian Eldritch’, ‘Eldritch Christian’, ‘Andrew Christian’. He asked me which one sounded the best. Maybe he was looking for someone to confirm his own bias, but I told him, ‘Andrew Eldritch.’”
“From my point of view, that's the earliest I can define the use of ‘Andrew Eldritch’. That was a sea change. To me it was always ‘Andy’, but when he became ‘Andrew Eldritch’, there was a change in his attitude too. It was almost like he put on this persona and decided he had to be a bigger arsehole.”
About a week later Ashton and Eldritch went into central London for mastering and to cut a lacquer. This was done at “Porky’s” (George Peckham’s) cutting room in Portland Recording Studios. “If Andrew went there, it was probably because Motörhead had gone there,” Ashton drily observes.
Before that single came out, The Sisters of Mercy would play their most important gigs to date.
Endnotes
[i] Mills was actually ruder about Eldritch than this. “He didn’t look anywhere near as good without shades on. He's got these piggy little eyes. There's a reason why rock stars wear shades. All the rock stars with great eyes don’t wear shades. Look at Iggy. The shades were there from the beginning. Long dyed black hair, very much out of time, when I first met him sitting on the stairs. He’s a small guy, unimposing in that sense. That didn’t surprise me. A lot of rock stars and actors when you meet them are often smaller than you think they're going to be: Small Dog Syndrome.”
[ii] Gary Marx would almost certainly have gone with Eldritch to meet Mills.“We did all the business together in the early days. That was unless Andrew had already fallen out with a particular individual, and then I’d have to go alone. That was true of Rough Trade and then later with Tony K at Red Rhino.”
[iii] This was a gig organised by the Bradford promoter, Nick Toczek. It was the second of his “Gory Details” nights.
[iv] According to Chris Carr (The Birthday Party’s manager) in Ian Johnston’s book “Bad Seed”: “At the end of their set, Mr Eldritch and friends wanted to know what The Birthday Party thought of them, and asked me to find out … I asked them if they were sure about this. They were, so I went off to the dressing room. The only person who saw anything of their show was Mr Mick Harvey, who announced that The Sisters of Mercy were the worst band to have ever supported The Birthday Party. I went back and recounted this to Mr Eldritch. The following Monday I got a call from The Sisters of Mercy saying that the band had had a meeting and had decided to continue, and to wish The Birthday Party all the best in the future. They understood their criticism but thought rather than break up, they'd carry on. It was all very dramatic.”
Phill Calvert, then the drummer in The Birthday Party: “We thought most bands in the UK played pretty lousy live … with a few notable exceptions. When we arrived in the UK we had already played over 200 shows as a band and we were only 21 year olds. There wasn’t that much work in the UK, so The Sisters Of Mercy probably were pretty crap that night …They had an entry level Roland drum machine … I thought it let them down and that they needed drummer. I think they mastered all of this later and became quite a band. I was never a fan. Too much angsty goth with no humour. I never thought they were worth the effort.”
[v] The church, according to Craig Adams, was St Mark’s Church, Woodhouse.
[vi]Mills adds: “Over time, this was jaundiced by his attitude.”
[vii] After thinman had said his piece on Burned Down Days, Mills (Les) and Kilburn (dk) had, what Kilburn terms, “some messy, although amusing, exchanges.”Both accused the other of taking credit for assisting The Sisters, both of them incorrectly conflating the tape handover in May 1981 with events much later in 1982. In a moment of clarity, it occurred to dk and Les that they were talking about “totally different time periods. Worth straightening out if anyone's interested,” suggested dk. “Captain Troy Tempest” was interested.
“So here's the scenario then,” he posited.“Period 1: the Sisters give a tape to first point of contact and first person to take an interest, Mr Duncan Kilburn, who is good enough to spread the joy … Seems it may well have been Duncan who suggested to Andrew that he seek out Howard in the first place … it wasn't Les who did that.Period 2, a little later: John+Les pursue Andrew as Andrew+Howard pursue Les.Period 3: Les and Andrew and John and the Furs do some stuff and then stop pursuing each other to go about their business separately (sic).Period 4, much later: Andrew still loves Duncan. Which is lovely.”It is highly likely – spelling mistake notwithstanding - that Captain Troy Tempest was Andrew Eldritch, a huge Gerry and Sylvia Anderson fan, re-joining the fray under another pseudonym.
If not Eldritch, then Captain Troy Tempest was nevertheless almost entirely correct in his preferred narrative.He also noted that “Les initiated or enabled or at least tolerated John's production stint, which looks to have been a good thing too … Seems to me that on this occasion, Les was doing his job for the Furs, doing a job for the Sisters, and the system actually worked as it's supposed to.” This is an understatement. “The system” produced ‘Alice/Floorshow’ one of the great singles of its or any other era.
[viii] Ashton: “He was a little aloof, reserved; you weren’t quite sure what he was thinking, you'd have to ask him. He played his cards close to his chest. I definitely got the sense he was different. He was mysterious, almost a Howard Hughes character in some ways, but he was no crackpot.”
[ix] The Portastudio was the same type - the 144 - that Bruce Springsteen had used to record “Nebraska” a few months earlier in January 1982.
[x] Ashton, however, remembers that “they were squeezed into the cellar, which was kind of rocky and dug out.” This is probably a false memory: it was not physically possible to fit four men and their equipment into the cellar of 7 Village Place.
[xi] John Ashton in the 2015 Sex, WAX, N Rock N Rollinterview recalled Village Place very clearly. “It was definitely a fan-based kind of house. Andrew was a fan of certain types of music, including the obvious new wave, punk ones. There were a million videos. This was just when VCRs with the big clunky buttons hadn’t been commercially available for that many years. He had a stack of tapes and they were all Motörhead or AC/DC; more Motörhead than AC/DC. I began to put this together: this guy is a Metalhead. This is really what it's all about and he just put a twist on it. Definitely a rock guy who dressed it up a little bit differently, all in black with pointy shoes with the long, straight hair and the mirror shades.”
[xii] One candidate would be The Faversham on Springfield Mount right next to University. Although it functioned as Eldritch and Shearsby’s local, and it’s large, it isn’t Victorian. Therefore, The Royal Park - in the heart of Hyde Park and nearer 7 Village Place - and large and 19th Century is the much more likely destination.
[xiii] Ashton describes Marx (in a catch-all Northern accent) as “reet proud to be a Yorkshireman” and someone who “didn't give a shit and played that up. He really didn't give a fuck. What-you-see-is-what-you-get and what you’re getting is guitar. He was great, a little cynical, that punk aesthetic.” Marx is “a bit puzzled by this and unsure if John is mixing two memories together or quite what he means. Yes, I am from Yorkshire but even close friends usually say I lack a particularly strong accent. That description seems a better description of Craig but I guess for a Londoner it may hold true of me.”
[xiv] In the 2015 interview, Ashton remembered making ‘Alice’ as “a great experience. It was my first foray into any kind of production. It was all done by us together, collectively. We were all fiddling around with the EQ, messing around with the gates, compressors. It was all a bit experimental. What you get at the end is the sum product a five guys working very intently on a piece of music.”